teresting. But I regard the "Acta
Sanctorum" as specially valuable for mediaeval history, secular as well
as ecclesiastical, simply because the authors--having had unrivalled
opportunities of obtaining or copying documents--printed their
authorities as they found them; and thus preserves for us a mine of
historical material which otherwise would have perished in the French
Revolution and its subsequent wars. Yet it is very strange how little
this mine has been worked. We must suppose indeed that it was simply due
to the want of the helps enumerated above--all of which have come into
existence within the last twenty-five years--that neither of our own
great historians who have dealt with the Middle Ages, Gibbon or Hallam,
have, as far as we have been able to discover, ever consulted them.

Yet the very titles of even a few out of the very many critical
dissertations appended to the "Lives of the Saints," will show how very
varied and how very valuable were the purely historical labours of the
Bollandists. Thus opening the first volume of the "Thesaurus
Antiquitatis," a collection of the critical treatises scattered through
the volumes published prior to 1750, the following titles strike the
eye:--"Dissertations on the Byzantine historian Theophanes," on the
"Ancient Catalogues of the Roman Pontiffs," on the "Diplomatic Art"--a
discussion which elicited the famous treatise of Mabillon, "De Re
Diplomatica," laying down the true principles for distinguishing false
documents from true--on certain mediaeval "Itineraries in Palestine," on
the "Patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem," on the "Bishops of
Milan to the year 1261," on the "Mediaeval Kings of Majorca" and no less
than three treatises on the "Chronology of the early Merovingian and
other French Kings." Let us take for instance these last mentioned
essays on the early French kings. In them we find the Bollandists
discovering a king of France, Dagobert II., whose romantic history,
banishment to Ireland, restoration to his kingdom by the instrumentality
of Archbishop Wilfrid, of York, and tragic death, had till their
investigations lain hidden from every historian. As soon, indeed, as
they had brought this obscure episode to light, and had elaborately
traced the genealogy of the Merovingians, their claim to the discovery
was disputed by Hadr. Valesius, the historiographer to the French Court,
who was of course jealous that any one else should know more about the
orig